The most difficult habit remains! “Bridges” (or bridge building) is depicted below as the next important step in the idea delivery process.

Intrapreneurs like to have their prototypes analyzed and chosen for funding. The ability to experiment while simultaneously delivering on Box 1 commitments is one of the hardest balancing acts of all.

Yet intrapreneurs find a way to keep their ideas alive using a variety of different techniques. They find a way to propose a new product while simultaneously delivering the old one. This habit, depicted below, builds a bridge from the old product to the new.

Intrapreneurs distribute their time among the three boxes on the left hand side of Figure 16. They are delivering Product X while simultaneously exploring new ideas and problems. They use the results of the work in Box 2 and Box 3 to build a bridge to a new product offering (Product Y in what becomes their next Box 1). Building the bridge takes a lot of work and a lot of time. It also may take a lot of people, and these people are typically busy with Box 1 activities of their own.

How, then, do intrapreneurs build the bridge? The answer lies in their unique ability to keep ideas alive by inspiring and then leveraging human capital. Intrapreneurs commonly leverage human capital from one of four areas:

Interns. College interns are a wonderful thing. They often do not show up in a business unit’s headcount. They are easier to hire than full-time employees, especially given the fact that they may only be available for a few short months. They are typically eager and productive. It is often less risky to have them work on something new (as opposed to relying heavily on them in Box 1). Interns are a great way to quickly build innovative new ideas, and the enthusiasm innate in intrapreneurs can be highly motivational for a college intern.

New employee training. New employees are often assigned to Box 1 activities. It typically takes new employees a while to get up to speed. Savvy intrapreneurs will take them in and help them to cut their teeth on some of the newer ideas. When introduced to Box 2 and Box 3 activities, the new hire may begin to mimic intrapreneurial behavior when they are ultimately moved into their own Box 1 job.

Outside of the business unit. Intrapreneurs are, by their very nature, collaborative. They are keenly aware of the work going on in other business units. They are quick to recognize slack in other organizations and present those employees with the opportunity to contribute to new ideas. These collaborations, of course, often involve engagements between two different intrapreneurs from separate business units. A well-connected intrapreneur will often look to pull in resources from field engineers, too. Anyone who looks even marginally underutilized is fair game.

Pitching co-ownership. Most people enjoy being a part of a successful endeavor. An intrapreneur motivates employees within their own business units by articulating the value of Product Y. Co-workers quickly realize the contributions made by intrapreneurs and recognize that by dedicating part of their own time to Box 2 and Box 3 in support of “their” intrapreneurs, they will be lining themselves up for the best work if and when Product Y is approved. If they participate in the beginnings of Product Y, they become known as the best candidates to kick off the formal development.

By applying the tenets of bridge building, the intrapreneur creates a volunteer team that, together, turns valuable ideas into marketable products. In the process, the intrapreneur serves as a mentor to many. The end result is a Product Y proposal that usually has the teeth and the legs to be adopted as a new direction in the organization, given that the intrapreneur has a strong track record on the seventh and final habit: they finish.

And finishing is intrinsically linked to the foundational habit of all intrapreneurs: productivity.

January 27, 2012

This is the sixth in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur.

The previous habit (3-box time management) described the first step required to deliver upon an idea in a large corporation.

The next habit is an unusual and counter-intuitive technique that enables an intrapreneur to continue the delivery of their idea. Visibility management (often referred to as visibility avoidance) is depicted below as the next step in the cycle.

Visibility avoidance – not actively publicizing one’s talents – seems to be incongruent with climbing the corporate ladder. Doesn’t everybody want to be recognized for their great ideas and promoted to higher levels of responsibility?

Intrapreneurs, quite simply, need not. Their intrinsic passion for the generation and delivery of ideas is their main reason for coming to work every day. They fill their time with trips to the lab to debug alongside their teammates. They close themselves inside remote conferences rooms and collaborate on whiteboards. They spend hours on their laptops, searching high and low for new sources of learning on the latest technologies. They visit local customers to check on their configurations.

They are not motivated by rewards and recognition from others. They are rewarded by the process that they have created for themselves.

This sort of self-motivation does not leave a lot of time for the bureaucratic meetings that are so common at large corporations. Intrapreneurs who find themselves lassoed in these types of meetings recognize they are jeopardizing the core value that is the hallmark of any intrapreneur: productivity. They understand that certain forms of recognition by executive management are accompanied by the unwelcome trappings of inefficient assignments and endless, countless meetings.

While they eschew recognition by executives, they strive for visibility with the builders in the trenches.

As a result of maintaining the delicate balance between maximizing trench visibility and minimizing corporate visibility, many intrapreneurs have adopted a “plus 2” approach to recognition within the corporation. They create extremely strong bonds of trust with their direct manager, reinforced by their consistently exceeding performance expectations, and strive for an equally strong bond with their manager’s manager.

Any regular interaction with managers and executives higher than two levels above their current position is generally avoided. Building trust with the first two higher links in the management chain can accomplish two things:

It allows the management chain to run interference for the intrapreneur, which keeps the intrapreneur out of inefficient meetings.

It allows the management chain to advocate on behalf of the intrapreneur, which can advance those causes that require resource allocation outside of the business unit.

Why would the links on the plus-2 management chain go to these lengths to advance the cause of an intrapreneur? It comes down, once again, to the core trait of an intrapreneur: productivity. Corporate intrapreneurs have a track record of success. Their previous inventions became products that continue to generate revenue. People like to work with them, and they raise morale. Their management chain wants to keep them happy, and will typically do their best to eliminate corporate obstacles (or raise them to protect the intrapreneur’s time).

By adding plus-2 management to the practice of 3-Box time management, the intrapreneur can make great progress on the delivery of their idea. Eventually they will reach the stage where they are ready to request formal recognition and funding for their idea. This phase is referred to as “Bridge Building”, and will be described in a subsequent post.

The next three habits, when practiced properly at a corporation, can often lead to the successful delivery of ideas. Idea delivery is characterized by the creation of a product or service that provides value to a customer.

These first stages of delivery occur as part of a technique known as 3-box time management, which is depicted below.

Vijay Govindarajan (VG) is a Professor of International Business at Dartmouth College. He is the author and evangelist of the 3-box strategic approach to corporate innovation. Three-box innovation strategy dictates that the majority of corporate resources should be invested in the Box 1 diagram listed below: Manage the Present. This box represents the continued development of existing products to yield most of a corporation’s revenue. Employees supporting this box focus on existing customers and processes, and they continue to leverage their existing competencies. In essence, this box “funds” the development of innovation within a corporation. Some companies fall into the trap of spending close to 100 percent of their resources in this box.

Vijay advises corporations to allocate portions of their resources to Box 2 and Box 3 as well as tried-and-true Box 1. Box 2 selectively abandons the past by “forgetting” most of what is known about the products built in Box 1, including why they were built and whom they were built to satisfy. This break from tradition enables an innovator to take existing products into completely different markets.

Box 3 is a more radical approach to innovation. It completely ignores current processes and products and prominently targets the future.

The figure below applies this 3-box corporate framework to an intrapreneur’s use of his or her own time (note that the box titles change when applied to an individual).

Intrapreneurs can be most effective when they are delivering products as part of a business unit (as opposed to being a member of a research team in an ivory tower). Why? They often prefer to be in the trenches, where they can be highly productive, visiting customers, and collaborating with others. They are respected within their organizations for doing those very things.

Perhaps their most significant contribution to their business unit’s product line is funding their employment and that of their collaborators. They are squarely positioned in Box 1.

Spending all of their time in one area of expertise does not enable intrapreneurs to achieve success. Their natural curiosity and passion will not allow them to stay in only one place. They practice the discipline of limiting the amount of time they spend in Box 1.

By limiting the amount of time they spend in Box 1, intrapreneurs make time for Box 2 and/or Box 3 activities. They set aside the time to learn about customer issues. They set aside the time to explore adjacent technologies. They regularly meet with experts in adjacent fields and collaborate to dream up ideas of what might be possible. Most importantly, they begin to build out their ideas.

It is worth pointing out the difference between Box 2 and Box 3 intrapreneurial behavior. Box 2 behavior is characterized by Venn diagram innovation. The intrapreneur collaborates in the context of a well-defined customer problem.

Box 3 behavior is characterized by blue sky innovation: taking the initiative to learn new technologies and collaborate without necessarily starting with the context of a defined customer problem. Blue sky innovators may ask themselves and others, “What might this capability be used to do?” Answers to this question can result in breakthrough innovation. It is often the case that breakthrough innovation can be applied to customer problems they don’t yet know they have!

It is a difficult balancing act to regularly spend time outside of Box 1. It takes passion and persistence. But it is the very first step that a new intrapreneur must take to prove his or her worth!

Subsequent steps build on this important ability to manage one’s time well. The technique of intentionally limiting personal visibility is a non-obvious method to effectively focus intrapreneurial efforts. I will elaborate further on this next step in a future post.

January 18, 2012

This is the fourth in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur.

Productivity is the foundational attribute of an intrapreneur. Initiative is a required next step. Neither of these attributes necessarily results in new ideas, and new ideas are of course an essential part of innovation.

New ideas are often generated during the third step, which is depicted below as collaboration.

Intrapreneurs are, by necessity, highly collaborative. The reason they practice Habit #2 (initiative) is because they fully recognize their need for new knowledge. They don’t know all of the problems their current (or future) customers are experiencing, and they lack comprehensive knowledge of an adjacent sphere of technology that just might light an innovative spark of how to solve a problem differently.

To overcome these limitations, intrapreneurs collaborate. Perhaps the best way to illustrate intrapreneurial collaboration is with an actual story. This story is from my industry (high-tech), but the pattern is applicable across a wide range of industries.

The e-book Innovate With Influence describes a collaborative effort to produce an idea that translated into multiple billions of dollars of product revenue. The idea was instrumental in giving rise to the adoption of disk array technology by mid-range corporations (one notch below enterprise customers in terms of size).

The idea was originally motivated by the need to solve the most important customer requirement of an information storage system: data integrity. In the 1980s, a new technology known as RAID had arisen. RAID used mathematical techniques to re-create information from failed disk drives. If the math was wrong, the customer would receive corrupt data. Customers wanted RAID because it was faster than any disk technology previously available.

Thousands of lines of new software had to be written to implement RAID. Dozens of failure permutations could impact RAID systems.

How could this software be tested to prove that the math never failed? The intrapreneur in this case was highly productive and an expert in RAID. He had taken the initiative to understand the customer sphere. The diagram below highlights the need for an intrapreneur to find an adjacent technology and collaborate.

In this case, the adjacent technology was a very robust testing framework. This framework already verified data integrity, but it did not have a specific solution for verifying RAID disk arrays. Employees in the two technology spheres collaborated on new functionality that inserted tortuous fault events at every mathematical calculation point. This tool became internally known as the disk array qualifier (DAQ). The resulting disk array, known as VNX®, achieved superior levels of quality that led to well over $12 billion of revenue generation in a 20-year period. The figure below depicts a Venn diagram of the DAQ solution.

These three circles represent the three basic habits of highly effective intrapreneurs. A highly productive employee becomes proficient in a particular expertise (in this case, RAID). The intrapreneur then takes the initiative to identify problems from the customer sphere (data integrity). Initiative spurs the search to find an applicable adjacent sphere (the test framework) and collaborate.

Collaboration between the two technologists yielded an innovative solution: the DAQ.

The next question becomes: how do you deliver upon new ideas? The answer to this question will become more apparent in future posts.

January 16, 2012

This is the third in aseries of articlesthat describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur. In my last post I made the following assertion:

While an intrapreneur is necessarily a highly productive employee, not every highly productive employee is an intrapreneur.

The second step in the diagram below represents the most differentiable attribute of an intrapreneur: initiative.

Innovators are a naturally curious bunch. They take the initiative to wander outside of their sphere of expertise. They do not need a manager to provide a map because they are guided by technologies and problems about which they care passionately.

The diagram below depicts the two areas of initiative on which an intrapreneur typically focuses. The intrapreneur must take initiative in both areas; anything less decreases the chance for effective innovation.

The first (and most important) area of initiative is the entrance into the customer sphere. It’s important to be aware of the two classes of customer: external and internal.

In my corporation (EMC), external customers are the businesses or consumers that purchase the innovative, new high-tech products that are being built.

Internal customers are the individuals and teams that build, test, sell, and support these high-tech products.

Regardless of whether the customer is internal or external, the intrapreneur must leave the comfort of his or her sphere of expertise and listen closely to customer requirements and problem statements.

Requirements gathering is a normal and mandatory part of any high-tech product development cycle. What is different about the intrapreneurial approach? The primary difference is that the intrapreneur is driven by personal interest. He or she is asking solely because of personal curiosity, or because of a passion for a particular field.

The second area of initiative is the continual drive to learn new technologies, especially those that are in some way adjacent to the intrapreneur’s sphere of expertise. These self-guided investigations are most effective if they are driven by the exposure to customer problems and requirements. It is possible to explore new technologies outside of the context of customer requirements; this is called blue sky innovation. Customer requirements will often surface as the intrapreneur practices the third habit: collaboration.

Expertise, customer exposure, and adjacent technology are the holy trinity of intrapreneurial innovation. This innovation approach is highly effective at large corporations and is also referred to as Venn Diagram innovation.

When productivity and initiative are combined with the next step (collaboration), ideas are produced. More to come on this topic in a future blog post.

January 12, 2012

This is the second in a series of articles that describe the unique traits of a corporate intrapreneur. These traits can be remarkably different from those that might be practiced by an entrepreneur working in a start-up environment.

The attribute of productivity is foundational to intrapreneurship, which is why it occupies the top position in this cyclical, seven-step chart.

How do intrapreneurs consistently deliver their ideas through the corporate maze of obstacles that are common at large companies? How do they become so influential?

The answer, of course, is that their track record of corporate productivity is stellar. If there is one thing that a corporation loves, it is an employee that delivers. In fact, the only thing that a corporation loves more is an employee that delivers early!

Great intrapreneurs deliver high-quality results that are ahead of schedule, even when given aggressive work assignments. They are dominant in their “sphere of expertise.” It takes months of hard work for an employee to become an expert in a given sphere.

I often advise college new hires to delay innovation activities in their first six to nine months on the job and focus instead of productivity. Deep technical knowledge is the jumping-off point for establishing an intrapreneurial track record.

While an intrapreneur is necessarily a highly productive employee, not every highly productive employee is an intrapreneur. Some productive employees like to work hard, establish a deep understanding of a technology, and then stay there. They are more than content to perpetually tweak and enhance their creations (or perhaps re-architect the same technology into a different form). This type of employee is indispensable for sustaining revenue generation from successful products. Without them, corporations could not fund newer, more innovative proposals.

Intrapreneurs, on the other hand, are productive but not satisfied to simply stay in their sphere. They remain in place long enough to deliver on their commitments, but they are intrinsically driven to create something new. They put into practice the second habit of intrapreneurs: initiative.

January 09, 2012

As an inventor I have witnessed a fairly distinctive pattern of intrapreneurship within my own multi-national corporation (EMC).

The employees that are the most successful at advancing their ideas through the corporate maze tend to operate using a fairly well-defined rhythm. The chart below breaks down this rhythm into a set of discrete steps that can be learned and practiced by creative employees world-wide.

Although this diagram is cyclical, intrapreneurs-in-training cannot simply jump on at any given point in the cycle. It is imperative that their very first step be the practice and discipline of productivity. Intrapreneurs by their very nature are productive; they know how to produce new products or services based on their own ideas.

What separates an intrapreneur from the many productive employees that can be found in any corporation? The answer is that they continue to take initiative beyond their required duties.

Over the course of the next several weeks this blog will dive into these seven steps in detail. Many of these steps are already described in the book Innovate with Influence.

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The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by DELL Technologies and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of DELL Technologies nor does it constitute any official communication of DELL Technologies.